Urgent drainage of a pericardial effusion causing left ventricular tamponade in a patient with severe rheumatic mitral stenosis improved cardiac output.
May alert clinicians to LV tamponade in mitral stenosis; single case leaves open generalizability of drainage effects.
A woman of 38 was admitted for urgent surgery of severe mitral stenosis causing pulmonary oedema. Echocardiography showed a pericardial effusion with apparent distortion and collapse of the left ventricle. Urgent drainage of the effusion before mitral valve surgery led to an improvement in cardiac output with no detectable change in right heart pressures.
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Davies et al. (1992) studied this question.
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